Language Support Template for Product Planning

Start with English plus the 1-2 languages with the highest business impact. Most B2B SaaS products see 80% of international revenue from 3-5 languages. Adding languages has diminishing returns, and each language adds ongoing maintenance cost. Scale based on data: if a language drives measurable revenue or user growth, promote it to a higher tier.

Yes, if the markets are significantly different. Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese have different vocabulary, spelling, and cultural norms. Treating them as the same language will feel wrong to users in both markets. For languages with minor regional variation (e.g., en-US vs. en-AU), a single variant with locale-specific formatting (dates, currency) is usually sufficient.

User-generated content (comments, messages, project names) stays in whatever language the user wrote it in. Do not auto-translate UGC. Offer an optional "translate" button using a machine translation API if users work across language boundaries. Mark machine-translated content visually so users know it is not the original text.

Ongoing translation costs typically run 15-25% of the initial translation investment per year, assuming your product ships new features regularly. For a mid-size SaaS app with 8,000 strings, initial translation costs $8K-$15K per language. Annual maintenance runs $1.5K-$4K per language. The real cost is not money but process overhead: every new feature needs translation, review, and QA in every supported language. ---